I'm in mind of an incident that occurred last summer. I had a conversation with Rhonda, the Director, in which I told her, "Rhonda, I've given you example after example of your employees' apathy, incompetence and malfeasance. Whenever I do so, you handle it in one of three ways. If I give you an example of something that occurred  before you took over, you tell me, 'I can't speak to anything that happened before I got here.'" She exclaimed, "That's right, I can't!"

I said, "Fine. So now, I confine it to examples of things that have happened since you got here, some of them happening right now. You handle that in one of two ways. If I tell you over the phone, you pretend you haven't heard me. If I tell you to your face, you smile sadly and say nothing." Her reaction? She smiled sadly and said nothing. She does this whenever she's backed into a corner or confronted with evidence she can't refute. It's her go-to defense mechanism.

Shortly after I began dealing with her, about eight months into her term as Director, I was trying to impress upon her the apathetic nature of the staff she'd inherited from her predecessor, Dorothy Gay, who had been forced to resign the previous year (the circumstances of which are fodder for another post), and getting nowhere. I said, "Rhonda, why not try an experiment? Call your employees into your office one by one, and ask them, 'If this situation with this man is as egregious as I'm being told, why haven't I heard about it until now? Why didn't I hear his name until he walked into my office and introduced himself, eight months into my time here?' I guarantee you that not one of them will be able to give you an answer. Each of them will hem and haw, look down at the table and say nothing."

And of course, she smiled sadly and said nothing, and never did as I suggested. When I began our "dialogue" last summer, whenever I would mention anyone else on the staff, she would exclaim, "Oh, isn't she WONDERFUL!" She has a need to think that everyone and everything around her is just roses all of the time.

I now have to retain a lawyer because this woman is impossible to deal with. She never backs down and is never wrong. As I said in the previous post, Hebrew SeniorLife has done the residents of this facility - indeed, the entire Jewish community of Boston - a terrible disservice by placing this woman in charge. It is nothing less than a violation of trust.

They should be deeply ashamed.